Sydney and I will both be teaching Freshman Writing Seminars this fall. I’ll be teaching a course on non-linear narratives (stories that play with time and perspective), the course proposal for which I won the fellowship last spring. This should be fun! Sydney will be teaching a class of his own for the first time and seems quite pleased with the prospect of having control over the material and the way things will be taught.
But both of us are rankling under the restrictions of the writing center for which we will, technically, be working. Course titles must be no more than x number of characters. Course descritpions must be fewer than 125 words. That’s all understandable, if a bit annoying, but less palatable is the commandment that our course descriptions contain a “hook” to lure students into signing up for the class. A hook? You can imagine how well such ad-speak goes over with die-hard academic types. And of course there’s a lot of nonsense about what percentage of the class must be used to teach writing (by which we take them to mean comma-splices and not, say, thinking and argument, which we intend to do all the time). In other words, we aren’t taking the red tape too well. I’ve had to find my own way through and around such pages-long commandments in the past few years of teaching, but it’s really funny watching Sydney hit them for the first time. And now that two of us are in it, you can expect the house to be filled with much sharing of frustrations as new little wrinkles arise.
Erin
Alan Schmierer
Key word in your lament – control…you and my favorite son-in-law do indeed ‘chomp at the bit’ (a horsey little southern phrase), when the slightest control is pried from your grasps! As for the hook, hasn’t it gotten around that Prof E. Penner takes treats to class?
I actually do very little feeding of my students. Some of my classmates bake, and frequently!
Erin